uludag

Very weird indeed. People must not realize that you can completely change the response you get back from an LLM by how you ask questions. Any bias can implicitly be implanted in the question you ask and drastically modify the response. This is what I got Gemini to say about the article:

  The author’s tone in this piece can be described as brutally candid, deeply relieved, and unapologetically sarcastic.

Well paid expats wearing a hijab, who definitely aren't refugees, will not be treated nicely in Germany. Lived and worked in Germany and saw it a lot. It's a low bar indeed to treat skilled labor coming to your country nicely that sadly Germany can't even pass.

In case anyone's curious I recommend the podcast episode with Zach Barth on the Draknek and Friends podcast to hear where he's at now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLrh8wcBy8I

Happy to hear that he's continuing developing games and we can expect more to come!

But at some point you really have to accept ignorance. Like, there are countless stories that anyone could read and be outraged about. I think it makes sense to determine the areas that you can make a difference and be informed regarding those to the extend that it helps you making informed decisions.

Yeah, the game "Baseball" on the NES is a good example. I get though that an 8-bit aesthetic would be very tricky to get things like the player portrait details looking right. Cool project by the way!

I'm not sure if this is just me but the mismatch in pixel sizes and inconsistent palette is very jarring. This would be more impressive if this actually matched the 8-bit aesthetic of like the NES.

Yeah, I get all forms of media are avoiding the appearance of using AI like the plague. I still think that what they're saying can still be taken at face value. Like if the game has a 3D sequel I don't immagine the time to release or quality would be outside the distribution of how long similar games take pre-AI.

Maybe you don't understand, if we didn't have LLMs expanding our ideas into longer form we wouldn't have anything to give to LLMs to summarize.

Here's an example of this regarding the recent indie hit "Mina the Hollower." They were recently interviewed and asked the question "What is Yacht Club's stance on AI and has AI been used in the production of Mina the Hollower at all?" to which their reply was "We all got caught up in AI fever like the rest of the world, but we didn't find it was very effective for what we're doing. Maybe our work just isn't that generic! We've found some ways it can help... like Google or a thesaurus, but it hasn't affected what's in our game." [1]

It's hard to immagine that even the best AI model would result in anything better than a marginal reduction in release timeline. Like maybe for such projects one could spend $X00,000 worth of tokens for maybe like a %single-digit-percent reduction in time to release. Marginally good, maybe even project saving, but not any larger a paradigm shift than Unity was.

[1] https://www.gamereactor.eu/mina-the-hollower-interview-discu...

I've been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit and testing out the demos people have been sharing, as this would be the place where people most enthusiastic about vibe-coding games post and everything I've seen has been immensely underwhelming. The problem with these games fall into the following categories:

- An utter lack of animation. So many games feature mostly static images.

- AI assets make the game's art style feel horribly incohesive. I played a TCG game where there were high fantasy art, chibi 2d art, anime art, seemingly used haphazardly.

- Bad UX. For example, in the same TCG game, all of the cards had very fancy artwork generated, but the game board itself was far away enough that the made the cards look like blobs on the board.

- Buggy mechanics: There was this guy why shared a platformer generated by fable where you move a lamp to create a shadow path. The character had very awkward movement, would constantly get stuck/unstuck, and would be hard to control.

- Broken mechanics: A lot of games featured exploits that just rendered the game boring to play

- Poor balancing

- Lack of ovararching game structure: no story, no meta-progression, no world-map. These AI games tend to be isolated experiences.

I don't see the masses creating quality, sellable games anytime in the near future. There are so many aesthetic qualities to a game that have direct human bottlenecks. AI can even make games significantly worse as you can seemingly implement many bad mechanics without validating them. Good game devs seem to be relentlessly pruning out the things that down work.

I kind of feel like I'm going crazy when I read comments like this. The era of "little flash games" has never left and there have always been countless number of such games developed. The only thing AI is doing is putting AI developed games in front of Hacker News readers.

Same thoughts exactly. I personally started looking into indie game dev and I've just started to realize how naive I was and how hard just game design can be, and that I'll probably never be good at it, and that most of my ideas are pretty garbage (or incomplete at best).

Even with the perfect AI to write, one would need to iterate through many different ideas, play testing constantly, getting people to play test and analyze what they found fun and where they got stuck. And to get the best ideas you'll need to be playing lots of different kinds of games.

I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.

I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.

Here's what the $12 payed for: https://github.com/datasette/datasette-agent/commit/a75a8b72...

Such a fix would have only required basic CSS knowledge and taken max 5 minutes with the HTML inspector. Paying $12 to save 5 minutes ($144/hour) is a decision that a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable making.

Any suggestion on how I should calibrate my cynicism towards this?

I can immagine Anthropic running this experiment multiple times and picking the most impressive one. Or I could immagine like this entire run costing like $1000+ of tokens for this particular run. Or maybe they tried a bunch of Pokemon games and it couldn't even finish some of them. Or is it just able to do this because it has an immense amount of FireRed training data, and if you were to give it an "original" Pokemon game, where it actually had to navigate novel circumstances it would fail.

I had a thought about this coming from the book "Seeing Like a State."

Productivity in large organizations has never been and can never be purely of the legible work which is written in Jira tickets, documented, expressed clearly, but is sustained by an illegible network of relationships between the workers and unwritten knowledge/practices. AI can only consume the work which is legible, but as more work gets pushed into this realm, the illegible relationships and expertise becomes fragmented and atrophies, which puts backpressure on the system's productivity as a whole. And reading said book, my guess that attempting to impose perfect legibility for the sake of AI tooling will ultimately prove disastrous.

There could be a whole spectrum of types of repositories where these tools exceed and fail. I can immagine a large repository, poorly documented, with confusing inconsistent usages/patterns, in a dynamic language, with poor tests will almost always lead to failure.

I honestly think that size and age alone are sufficient to lead these tools into failure cases.

I try to avoid LLMs as much as I can in my role as SWE. I'm not ideologically opposed to switching, I just don't have any pressing need.

There are people I work with who are deep in the AI ecosystem and it's obvious what tools they're using It would not be uncharitable in any way to characterize their work as pure slop that doesn't work, buggy, untested adequately, etc.

The moment I start to feel behind I'll gladly start adopting agentic AI tools, but as things stand now, I'm not seeing any pressing need.

Comments like these make me feel like I'm being gaslit.

I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing.

It might be just me but this reads as very tone deaf. From my perspective, CEOs are seething at the mouth to make as many developers redundant as possible, not being shy about this desire. (I don't see this at all as inevitable, but tech leaders have made their position clear)

Like, imagine the smugness of some 18th century "CEO" telling an artisan, despite the fact that he'l be resigned to working in horrific conditions at a factory, to not worry and think of all the mass produced consumer goods he may enjoy one day.

It's not at all a stretch of the imagination that current tech workers may be in a very precarious situation. All the slopware in the world wouldn't console them.

This logic seems reversed though. If someone is primarily vibe coding, why wouldn't a phone be just fine?

Either way, there are still completely legitimate reasons why one would want to code on their phone, with or without AI.

I'm imagining it even worse: you have to pay a subscription to get your oven to go above a certain temperature and for it to "fast pre-heat" and to not have it show you ads.

Nothing wrong with using LLMs—until every paragraph sounds like it’s A/B tested for LinkedIn virality. That’s the rot setting in.

The problem isn’t using AI—it’s sounding like AI trying to impress a marketing department. That’s when you know the loop’s closed.

I wonder what would happen if there was a concerted effort made to "pollute" the internet with weird stories that have the AI play a misaligned role.

Like for example, what would happen if say 100s or 1000s of books were to be released about AI agents working in accounting departments where the AI is trying to make subtle romantic moves towards the human and ends with the the human and agent in a romantic relation which everyone finds completely normal. In this pseudo-genre things totally weird in our society would be written as completely normal. The LLM agent would do weird things like insert subtle problems to get the attention of the human and spark a romantic conversation.

Obviously there's no literary genre about LLM agents, but if such a genre was created and consumed, I wonder how would it affect things. Would it pollute the semantic space that we're currently using to try to control LLM outputs?

... in opposition to the car makers who want to turn everything into highways and parking lots, who really want all forms of human walking to be replaced by automobiles.

"They really cant run like a human," they say, "a human can traverse a city in complete silence, needing minimal walking room. Left unchecked, the transitions to cars would ruin our city. So lets be prudent when it comes to adopting this technology."

"I'll have none of that. Cars move faster than humans so that means they're better. We should do everything in our power to transition to this obviously superior technology. I mean, a car beat a human at the 100m sprint so bipedal mobility is obviously obsolete," the car maker replied.

The most recent Stack Overflow survey have vim at 25% and neovim at 14% for the question "Which development environments and AI-enabled code editing tools did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year?" Even more interesting is that for the 2023 survey Vim and Neovim were at 22.3% and 11.8% respectively.

If the goal is to get more than 50% usage statistics then yeah, you can say they lost, but are dev tools only valid/useful/viable if they have a majority of developers using them? I say they've had tremendous success being able to provide viable tools with literally zero corporate support and a much smaller user base.

I think this communal subconscious response is coming from a valid place though. I will call the current explosion in AI if:

  - it causes mass unemployment and social unrest
  - leads to a further concentration of wealth and increase in wealth inequality
  - it means I have to work more, produce more, all for the same wage or less
  - it's implementation leads to large societal harms such as increased isolation/loneliness
  - it ends up being overhyped causes a large economic crisis

I think the main fear is that these products will become so enshitified and engrained into everywhere that, looking back, we'll be wishing we didn't depend so much on the technology. For example, the Overton window around social media has shifted so much to the point that it's pretty normal to hear views that social media is a net negative to society and we'd be better off without it.

Obviously the goal of these companies is to generate as much profit as possible as soon as possible. They will turn the tables eventually. The asymmetry will go in the opposite direction, maybe to the extend that one takes advantage of the current asymmetry.

Naive question but wouldn't it could as having AI write 50%+ of your code if you just use an unintelligent complete-the-line AI tool? In this case the AI is hardly doing anything intelligent, but is still getting credit for doing most of the work.

I'm in the same exact boat. I started with a lot of different tools but eventually went back to hand coding everything. When using tools like co-pilot I noticed I would ship a lot mode dumb mistakes. I even experimented with not even using a chat interface and it turns out that a lot of answers to problems are indeed found with a web search.

Not only this, I feel if people in the UK somehow were able to travel back in time and encounter "their culture", they'd feel extremely alienated and maybe even feel a level of disdain. The daily prayers, Bible reading, strict Sabbatarianism and religious festivals would seem completely alien. Without a doubt the modern Muslim or asian immigrant, especially after the first generation, are so much closer to the average UK resident than their traditional culture.